FROM The Babylon Bee:

Declaring that he “has to be true to himself,” local man Steve Bakowski announced Friday that he is bravely stepping out and choosing to openly self-identify as a man.

“I don’t care what people say. I don’t care what people call me,” an audacious Bakowski told reporters. “I know in my heart that I’m a man. I’ve always known it, ever since I was a kid. I’ve never even second-guessed it. So I’m going to tell it like it is. I’m a man, and I’m not ashamed to say it.”

When asked about the possibility of facing backlash for his courageous stance, Bakowski was undeterred.

Adoration of the Magi, Hieronymous Bosch; 1470s

“The three kings with their attendants, prostrate at the feet of the Infant Jesus, were the firstlings of the heathens who acknowledged Jesus, and entered His Church. As we reflect upon the great happiness vouchsafed to them, the question forces itself upon us: “Why do not all nations likewise enjoy a participation in their happiness?” My answer is: “Because they do not look upward with the same love of truth to the star of the Magi;” and this, as I understand it, I will explain today.”

“The Feast of the Epiphany” by Father Francis Xavier Weninger, 1876

Virgin and Child, from an Adoration Group, ca. 1515–20 German; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

“The word Epiphany means the manifestation or apparition of God to His creatures. The Church commemorates on this day three manifestations of our Lord: the first to the Gentiles in the persons of the Magi: the second to the Jews at the moment of His baptism by St. John; the third to His own disciples by His first miracle at Cana in Galilee. Yet the first of these manifestations is more especially the object of this day’s festival, which is called on this account the Kings’ Feast.” Source

The Eastern kings the star have seen,
They hasten on their way;
Long time they’ve watched and waiting been
The dawning of that day:

The dawning of the day of grace,
The gleam of Jacob’s star,
The Virgin’s child of Jesse’s race
Whom prophets saw afar.

Glory give to God on high!

And now they open treasures rare,
Which Indian silks enfold,
Of myrrh which sweetly scents the air,
Of frankincense and gold. Read More »

Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1920

REFLECTIONS on the often bittersweet musical landscapes of the great English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 – 1958), as well as his contemporary Gustav Holst (1874 – 1934), are posted at The Orthosphere. Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

Concerning landscape – and its aesthetic and metaphysical meanings – the philosopher Roger Scruton has written in his study of Beauty (2009) that, “Landscapes… are very far from works of art – they owe their appeal not to symmetry, unity and form, but to an openness, grandeur and world-like expansiveness, in which it is we and not they that are contained.”  In confronting the landscape, then, the percipient subject experiences something like a cosmic moment, understanding his own mortal limitations against the enduring earthly and vegetative environment that affords him a home and yet, being non-sentient, remains alien or at least indifferent to him.  Yet vegetative though it might be, the landscape can stand as metaphor for something else sublime and, with respect to man, entirely prior and creative – namely the divine.

The Journey of the Magi, Stefano di Giovanni; 1433-35

THE WISE MEN

— G.K. Chesterton

Step softly, under snow or rain,
To find the place where men can pray;
The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way.

Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
On tortured puzzles from our youth,
We know all labyrinthine lore,
We are the three wise men of yore,

And we know all things but the truth.
We have gone round and round the hill
And lost the wood among the trees,
And learnt long names for every ill,

And served the mad gods, naming still
The furies the Eumenides.
The gods of violence took the veil
Of vision and philosophy,

The Serpent that brought all men bale,
He bites his own accursed tail,
And calls himself Eternity.
Go humbly…it has hailed and snowed… Read More »

THEY think you are.

See commentary by Christopher Bollyn, author of Solving 9/11: the Deception that Changed the World, in the last 15 minutes or so of this video. His comments about fear at the very end are especially important. Don’t be afraid! All decent people — Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim — should join together and take his message seriously.

The Bean King, Jacob Jordaens, 1635-55

In medieval and Tudor England, “Twelfth Night, the evening before Epiphany (January 6 – when the biblical kings reached the newborn Christ Child), was a final frenzy of Christmas feasting, drinking and raucous merry making before the community returned to its daily working grind for the rest of the winter.

…. At the beginning of the Twelfth Night festival, a cake that contained a bean and perhaps a pea was eaten. The male who found the bean would rule the feast as a king. Midnight signaled the end of his rule, and the world would return to normal. The common theme was that the normal order of things was reversed. This Lord of Misrule tradition dates back to pre-Christian European festivals such as the Celtic festival of Samhain & the Ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia.”

Read more at It’s About Time.

THE Washington Post reports:

Drinking is killing twice as many middle-aged white women as it did 18 years ago.

Generally, middle age (age 35 to 54)  is not the time to die in modern societies. It is past teenage dangers, before the serious perils of age, and improved medical care and public-health campaigns are keeping more people alive.

So why are middle-aged white women dying more often even while death rates for other groups continue to go down? What are white women doing that is so different?

[Why death rates for white women in rural America are spiking]

One simple answer is: a lot more drinking.

FROM The Anti-New York Times’s report on the Dalai Lama, “the CIA phony:”

The lowest specimens of humanity on earth are those who do evil while professing to be holy and spiritual. A regular, run-of-the-mill evil-doer is bad enough; but it takes a special kind of psychopath to keep a straight face while acting all pious and godly. Even the likes of slimy slicksters such as an Obongo or a Bill Clinton might struggle to pull off such an act without bursting out into laughter. And when it comes to phony piety, no one puts on the front better than that Tibetan trickster, the Dalai Lama. (Bow your head in reverence as you speak his name.)

THE NEW LAW

— Brother Francis Maluf

I speak not now ‘midst awesome clouds
Nor give my law on stones,
For now I’ve come to be your Child
In flesh and blood and bones. Read More »

KRISTA BURTON writes in The New York Slimes:

Lesbians were working on communal organic farms and freaking out about pesticides decades before the rest of the country. Who do you think made food co-ops cool?

Lesbians did, my child.

We lesbians have been making our own pickles and brewing gross health teas forever. We’ve had a community-supported agriculture farm share since your grandmother was feeling feelings while “practicing kissing” with her best friend (before getting engaged to your grandpa).

Now quick — describe society’s idea of a “typical hipster” for me. Read More »

“We need to push for the opposite of this massive and Orwellian increase in centralisation, by decentralising money power. Hence the creation of community banks across countries, operated and controlled locally, accountable to local communities, and not-for-profit.

“The best working example is Germany, where for the past almost 200 years about 70 per cent of banking has been in the hands of not-for-profit community banks.”

— Prof. Richard Werner

THE CHRISTMAS season is by no means over. Or rather, the commercial Christmas season is over but the liturgical season continues until the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin on February 2. Please don’t let your observance of Christmas be desupernaturalized by following the schedule determined by the retail world, which has no interest in Christmas once the gift-buying frenzy has passed.

Here is a wonderful version of “Maria Wiegenlied” or “Mary’s Lullaby” sung by the soprano Kathleen Battle. An English translation of the German song:

Amid the roses Mary sits and rocks her Jesus-Child
While amid the treetops sighs the breeze so warm and mild
And soft and sweetly sings a bird upon the bough
Ah, Baby, dear one
Slumber now

Happy is Thy laughter; holy is Thy silent rest
Lay Thy head in slumber fondly on Thy mother’s breast
Ah, Baby, dear one
Slumber now

Adoration of the Shepherds, Fra Filippo Lippi; 1406

William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy

There were no moral grays in the Hoppy westerns. Evil was always depicted as evil. Lawbreakers knew perfectly well that they were doing wrong and expected to be trailed and punished if caught.  Sob stories, evasions, and excuses were so unacceptable in the moral code upheld in the Hoppy westerns that villains never even offered them.

ALAN writes:

One day in 1955, my mother took a few snapshots as I stood on the white stone steps in our front yard wearing a black shirt, black pants, and cowboy boots, ready for western action with my two-gun holster.  At such moments, the heroism of TV western stars like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and the Cisco Kid and the Lone Ranger was uppermost in that 5-year-old boy’s mind. “Hoppy” was one of those heroes. I vaguely recall having a Hopalong Cassidy writing tablet or jigsaw puzzle in the early 1950s. A retired bookseller friend of mine told me how fondly she remembers watching the Hoppy westerns when she was a girl and hearing his wonderful, distinctive laugh.

William Boyd appeared as “Hopalong Cassidy” in 66 western films, all of which were filmed in black and white. He appeared in most of them dressed in dark shirt, dark trousers, dark hat, and dark boots, a stunning contrast with his silver-white hair and white horse Topper. Sixty-six motion pictures between 1935 and 1948, and not a word of profanity. Select at random any 66 motion pictures made since 1965 and tell me how many include no profanity.

The story of actor William Boyd and the Hoppy character is a fascinating one. After achieving stardom in the silent film era, Boyd became very fond of wine and women. At one point he was the victim of some undeserved bad publicity concerning a different actor with the same name.  Read More »

A READER in 2013 described a local version of the famous ballet, The Nutcracker.

AN article by George Holiday at American Renaissance describes the decline of a Catholic high school. Entitled “How Blacks Changed Our School,” it would be better titled, “How the Novus Ordo Church Changed Our School.”

None of the outrageous misbehavior by disruptive black students recounted vividly by Holiday (language warning) would have occurred 60 years ago, when Catholic school students sometimes received corporal punishment for minor disobediences such as not having their hands folded and a spirit of reverence came from the liturgy. Catholics were also having plenty of children (as the Church taught them to) so there was no need to recruit or pander to non-Catholics.

Sports were not idolized (Holiday mentions how that has contributed to the school’s decline) and blacks were also not held to different standards, as is described here. Holiday writes: Read More »

END-of-year articles are so often founded on the assumption, as Nicholas Pell writes, that humanity is tending toward moral progress. The evidence is to the contrary. Pell states in The Washington Post (of all places):

The broad assumption in the “current year” argument is that time inevitably ticks toward moral betterment. It’s a view that’s been espoused in different forms by the likes of Immanuel Kant (who wrote about “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity”), Karl Marx (who talked about emerging consciousness) and Martin Luther King Jr. (“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” ). If you’re a progressive, you probably take moral progress as an article of faith.

If you’re a conservative, a member of the political right or maybe just a working-class person who pines for a sunnier past, however, there’s a decent chance you’re skeptical of this concept. Mockery of the “current year” argument — especially as regularly employed by comedian John Oliver — has become a meme in some far-right circles. But you don’t need to be on the political extreme to perceive a world in decline. And in this context, 2016 was not one of those “meandering points of bewilderment” that King described but the continuation of a troubling trend. Read More »

FIGHT for the truth.

To the bitter end.

If you look at it as simply your “beliefs,” you are not worthy of it.